photo
by Yoshinori Abe

January 21, 2000

MAD
ABOUT McCAIN: A LOVE STORY

The
media’s well-known love affair with presidential aspirant
John McCain is almost embarrassing to behold; it is
like those couples that are all over each other in public,
and make you want to say: "Could you take that somewhere
else – perhaps someplace more private?" Salon’s
Jake Tapper is positively
homoerotic in his breathless ardor:

"First,
a confession: Sen. John McCain almost seduced me (professionally).
I was this close to becoming one of those reporters
who swoon whenever the Republican senator from Arizona
flashes his winning smile and demonstrates his passion
and boyish enthusiasm. Just another journalist infatuated
with the prisoner of war turned politician."

LOVE
LETTERS

Tapper
is typical, as is so often the case: the media has collectively
fallen in love with John McCain, and their reporting should
be read as one would read love letters – for that is the style
in which it is usually written. But when did this great romance
begin, and what is it based on? What, in short, do these moonstruck
lovers have in common? Most conservative commentators sourly
remark that the Arizona Senator’s popularity with the liberal
media stems from his image as the champion of "campaign finance
reform," and the smokers among us (see photo above) suspect
that his fanatical anti-tobacco stance might have something
to do with it  if there’s one thing our liberal elites
hate, it’s smoking and smokers. But if this is enough
to induce orgasm in an entire profession, then American journalists
are more whorish than even I imagined. No, it must be something
else, something sexier, and darker . . .

THE
McCAIN MOMENT

The
"McCain moment" occurred at the height of the Kosovo war,
when the drumbeat for unleashing ground troops was loudest
and McCain inundated the airwaves with his endlessly repeated
mantra of mind-numbing mendacity: "We’re in it, and we’ve
gotta win it!" Perhaps we can pinpoint the day of his debut
as the media’s darling: on April 5, 1999, a Monday, news junkies
woke up to McCain’s bellowing, on Fox News’ Crier Report,
that we ought to bomb Belgrade into rubble and call in the
Marines. Then on to Larry King (CNN), where he likened the
"ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo to the Holocaust, two programs
on MSNBC, two on CNBC, and a nice little chat with Charlie
Rose on PBS. He topped it off with Ted Koppel, and was up
bright and early to greet the day with Don Imus. The Washington
Post quoted one Republican strategist who remarked admiringly:
"It’s all McCain, all the time."

A
STAR IS BORN

Yes,
love can be an all-consuming thing, and there is every indication
that the Senator was (and is) just as smitten as his gaggle
of media groupies. As the Post reported:

"’We've
turned down far more than we've accepted,’ McCain said somewhat
sheepishly in a telephone interview from the Atlanta airport
yesterday morning. ‘Five times as much.’ He paused, realizing
he had overstated. ‘Well, I don't know the proportion, but
it's dramatically more that we've turned down.’"

THE
ANOINTED ONE

The
Kosovo war catapulted McCain into the top ranks of the Republican
contenders. This in spite of the fact that a ground war in
the Balkans was not all that appealing to American voters,
especially Republicans (they overwhelmingly opposed it), or
because McCain was especially popular among the Republican
grassroots (he was not that well-known). Before the war, he
was virtually unknown to the general public outside Arizona;
but our war-happy media soon made him a star with a national
following. For this was their war, one waged as much by CNN
as by NATO, and they were thrilled with McCain's blustering
rhetoric. Reporting McCain's call for ground troops in Kosovo,
CBS News reporter Rita
Braverman gushed: "This is key. He acknowledged: 'I
fully appreciate this means young Americans may die, and I
fully appreciate I take some responsibility for that.' McCain's
own military service and his time in that POW camp gives him,
perhaps, more authority to speak than any of the other power
players on this subject. Americans may not agree with him,
but at least they will not have to hunt for his meanings in
a maze of obfuscation. And when you listen to him, you have
no doubt that his words do not come from a committee of advisors
but from his own convictions."

POWER
PLAY

All
very noble, in a cinematic way: in an election year when the
talk is of campaign "narratives," as if running for office
is like starring in a movie, the slick production values of
the McCain Story played a key role in the 24-hour-a-day NATO
propaganda blitz, and played it quite self-consciously. This
is how "power players" are made. During the debate over his
crazed Senate resolution urging the President to use "all
necessary means" to prosecute the war on Serbia, he
admitted as much:

"I
know I have spoken provocatively. Although I believe my points
are correct, I could have been a little more restrained in
offering them. I was not because I hope it will encourage,
perhaps incite is a better word, greater debate today than
is contemplated by our leaders."

THE
INCITER

McCain,
the inciter of war – do we want his finger on the nuclear
trigger? Amid all the self-righteous fingerpointing that went
on about which candidate was spreading rumors that McCain
was a little unhinged – the "whispering campaign" was generally
blamed on the Bush camp – only Camille Paglia gave voice to
the obvious:

"The
TV camera does not lie, , , , It exposed McCain over time
as a seething nest of proto-fascist impulses. Despite his
recent flurry of radiant, P.R.-coached grins, McCain has the
weirdly and over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched,
humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel (from Mel Brooks' Hitchcock
parody, High Anxiety."

Of
course you have to be Camille Paglia to tell these things
just by looking at McCain on TV, quite aside from anything
he might have to say. For those who required more solid confirmation
of the man’s madness, there was his
memorable performance on CNN’s Crossfire [April 2, 1999],
in which he answered Bob Novak’s question about what we ought
to do in Kosovo as follows:

"I
think it's as follows, Bob, increase the intensity of the
bombing, recognizing that that entails civilian casualties.
That's the reason why war is so terrible. And it may even
mean losses of aircraft. It also means that we should, as
quickly as possible, prepare for the ground troops option
if necessary. And obviously, that's the last one. In the meantime,
there's a whole lot of things we can do with our Apache helicopters,
with A-10 Warthogs and with a number of other assets that
we have, and devote it all. "

ANOTHER
SYMPTOM

He
didn’t care how many casualties it took: McCain made it clear,
time and again, that he wanted to "win" this war at any
cost. And this is one of the first and most noticeable
symptoms of madness – the loss of any sense of proportion.
Here we are talking about an area of the world accurately
described by Bismarck as not worth the life of a single Prussian
grenadier, the scene of endless religious and ethnic wars
going back seven hundred years, with no treaty pledging us
to defend the territorial integrity of an ally. Indeed, we
were violating the territorial integrity of a sovereign
nation whose President we had hailed, a few short years ago
at Dayton, as the great peacemaker of the Balkans. Why launch
a mass invasion and military occupation of a region in which
the US has no historical, economic, or national security interest?
McCain’s answer was that our "values" dictated such a course.
He was and is fond of comparing alleged Serb "atrocities"
in Kosovo to the Holocaust: in a speech
before the Center for Security and International Studies
he accused the Serbs of "having waged a campaign of atrocities
against ethnic Albanians the likes of which we never expected
to see again in Europe."

TAKING
RESPONSIBILITY

McCain
pompously declared that he would "take responsibility" for
any American blood that was shed – but what about the thousands
of Serbs, Gypsies, and others killed and many more wounded,
mutilated, impoverished, and humiliated by the bombing campaign
he wanted to escalate? Now that approximately 200 bodies have
been exhumed from the "mass graves" of Kosovo – with no more
than a few thousand estimated casualties waiting to be uncovered
at other sites – will he take responsibility for having misled
the American people? Yet another symptom of mental disturbance
is the inability to admit to mistakes, or to take any kind
of moral responsibility for one’s action: for instance, serial
killers often do not comprehend the difference between right
and wrong. They lack an organ all others seem to have, in
varying degrees, one that enables the moral sense.

THE
McCAIN DOCTRINE

This
seems the key to understanding McCain’s opportunism, and yet
there seems to be, at least in the foreign policy area, a
fair degree of ideological commitment This is the man who
has declared that he thinks "the United States should inaugurate
a 21st century interpretation of the Reagan Doctrine,
call it rogue state rollback, in which we politically and
materially support indigenous forces within and outside of
rogue states to over throw regimes that threaten our interests
and values."

INTERVENTION
UNLIMITED

This
is McCain’s formula for intervention unlimited. From the Middle
East to the Far East, from Kosovo to points unknown and open-ended,
the McCain Doctrine means a whole series of "liberation" wars
– just like the one that "liberated" Kosovo. In the mind of
McCain, the conquest of Kosovo is just the beginning, the
first phase in a worldwide struggle. I have great difficulty
thinking of a single trouble spot on earth that the Senator
has not suggested some form of US intervention: Bosnia,
Kosovo, Iraq, the Caucasus, East Asia, perhaps even Rwanda.
In the event of that ultimate horror, a McCain presidency,
his odious mantra, repeated endlessly during the Kosovo war,
might be revised: "We’ve got to win it – since I’ve gotten
you in it."

NO
CONTEST

The
significance of McCain’s media-generated rise as Dubya’s only
big challenger is that it signifies the triumph and consolidation
of the GOP internationalists. While the Republican congressional
leadership and the grassroots opposed Clinton’s war – and
not just because it was Clinton’s – these two would-be party
standard-bearers endorsed military action. The great "contest"
for what is left of the soul of the Republican Party is a
struggle between the moderate and militant wings of the War
Party. When it comes to foreign policy, there is no real debate,
since their differences are purely stylistic: while Bush is
the passive receptacle of his advisors’ ambitious interventionism,
McCain once again plays the role of the inciter  a firebrand
with a messianic streak right next to his mean streak.

A
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Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention
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